Stupid question thread

[_jal_]

So can it make the car lopsided?

Tesla designed their packs so that half of the batteries discharge left to right and the other half right to left. It's fine

 

[Tevvy]

Another daft question.......can I see a 'live view' of the superchargers anywhere? i.e. to see how many points are available?

 

[cpa]

Another daft question.......can I see a 'live view' of the superchargers anywhere? i.e. to see how many points are available?

Not sure exactly what you are asking about.

If you use the 17" touchscreen in your vehicle and you depress the lightning bolt icon, you will get the Supercharger occupancy numbers for those that are within the boundaries of the map. If you zoom out several times, the area displayed on the map increases, and those SC that are within some predetermined radius will also indicate occupancy.

I cannot help you with your particular geography over there across the pond.

Where we live smack-dab in the middle of California, the touchscreen shows about a dozen or so Superchargers within about a 150-mile direct radius, including those that cannot be reached on one charge due to the Sierra Nevada range and the lack of roads that cross those mountains.

However, I am not sure that if you were to move the map many miles in one direction that those SC would display occupancy (like if I wanted to see the occupancy of Superchargers in Texas from my home in California.)

 

[HankLloydRight]

Hope this isn't an open invitation to start/revive various crackpot perpetual motion discussions that crop up here periodically.

For any newcomers, this is one of my all-time favorites: alternators

 

[Akikiki]

Or he should get in the car on an empty stomach or naked to save another .000001MPG.

Or hold his coffee outside the window as he drives.

 

[buttershrimp]

Here's my question... what is an electron? Is that thing where you win the popular vote but still end up losing because of the electron college?

 

[Akikiki]

electron. Its in the middle right between electpaul and electstan

 

[Quick2Judge]

We could all Google the proper answer but I would rather try to act smart... Einstein says.... Potential Energy = Mass x (Speed of Light Squared). So the really heavy battery is filled with insane potential energy. I am just guessing that when we hook up electricity we aren't adding any mass only converting the potential energy to more accessible energy. But then again I never went to electron college so I am not sure.

Now any one know why we drive on parkways and park on driveways?

 

[f-stop]

the local EV association held their annual Electrafest today - a great event aimed at teaching people all about EVs - test drives, static displays & info sessions etc. During one short talk about home charging, the presenter asked people in the audience what sort ot concerns held them back from buying an electric car. One person (who prefaced the question by saying she knew absolutely nothing about electric cars and therefore had lots of dumb questions) asked: "Is there a danger of getting electrocuted by an electric car?" it was a serious question, she was genuinely concerned about the hazards of driving an electric car.

I don't mention this to make fun of the person; hearing this and a few other odd questions from the audience just made me realize there's still a long way to go to educate people about EVs!

 

[Ulmo]

However, I am not sure that if you were to move the map many miles in one direction that those SC would display occupancy (like if I wanted to see the occupancy of Superchargers in Texas from my home in California.)

The last time I played with this, if you moved the map over to further SuperChargers than your current location, the map would slowly update with occupancy information for the new region, but the map would resist this; it:

• Goes slow
• Does not update all of them
• Will stop updating them if you keep doing this (scrolling around trying to find out more occupancy information of even more SuperChargers); you'd have to come back dozens of minutes later to have it reset and update again
  
• Would tend to only update those SuperChargers closer to you than further from you

It seemed to sort of randomly put this into some sort of probability weighting function; perhaps it was just an artifact of slow programming pathways updating in parallel, which would be fine if you weren't trying to look at a particular site.

Therefore, I recommend that anybody trying to look at occupancy data for a particular area quickly position the map to that exact area pretty quickly, without spending any time looking at areas that are irrelevant. I never perfected any magic foo to make this work better, except this targeting idea.

 

[Ulmo]

the local EV association held their annual Electrafest today - a great event aimed at teaching people all about EVs - test drives, static displays & info sessions etc. During one short talk about home charging, the presenter asked people in the audience what sort ot concerns held them back from buying an electric car. One person (who prefaced the question by saying she knew absolutely nothing about electric cars and therefore had lots of dumb questions) asked: "Is there a danger of getting electrocuted by an electric car?" it was a serious question, she was genuinely concerned about the hazards of driving an electric car.

I don't mention this to make fun of the person; hearing this and a few other odd questions from the audience just made me realize there's still a long way to go to educate people about EVs!

I like questions like this. People want to know the answers. You simply answer with the truth: there are appropriate insulators between you and the cables; not only are the cables routed away from anywhere they'd commonly contact any metal parts, but they are insulated and attached pretty well presumably to avoid damage. Any more detail, and I'm beyond my knowledge range I admit.